Chapter Five #2
word about all of this with his mother. But he was a child; surely certain indulgences ought to be made? A new baby had disrupted
Daniel’s life. He was probably just bored. The discussions had been inconclusive, as of yet.
An anticipatory hush fell when Daniel meandered over to Mr. Marchand.
At whom he stared unabashedly.
Mr. Marchand finally put his book down and returned the child’s unblinking regard.
Ginny held her breath. Surely Daniel would be devastated by Mr. Marchand’s burning gaze. She braced herself for the child’s
roars of dismay.
“Daniel, pet, don’t bother the gentleman while he’s reading,” his mother said vaguely.
“He’s not a bother,” Mr. Marchand replied.
Everyone forgave Mr. Marchand for this bald lie. It was his first evening in the sitting room. He would learn.
“Those are head bones.” Daniel pointed at Marchand’s skull ring.
“Indeed,” Mr. Marchand agreed. “It’s called a skull.”
“A skuuuullll,” Daniel crowed.
Lord Bolt surreptitiously dropped his head despairingly into his hands.
“I have bones in my head.” Daniel knocked with a fist on his pate.
“Well, that’s a very good thing,” Mr. Marchand told him. “Otherwise your head might collapse like a blancmange. You need something
in there to hold it up.”
Someone in the room hissed in a revolted breath, but Daniel convulsed into giggles.
Ginny begrudgingly conceded the point to Marchand. Little boys loved disgusting things. Hogarth was all that was proper and
polite now, but when he was seven years old, he had once skewered dog excrement with a stick and chased her with it.
“Can I hold it?” Daniel was emboldened to ask Mr. Marchand.
“My ring?”
Daniel bobbed his head.
“If your mother says it’s all right.”
Marchand glanced at Daniel’s mother, who nodded her permission.
To Ginny’s astonishment, he pulled that ring—probably worth a few hundred pounds—from his finger. “Be careful with it,” he
admonished.
Daniel accepted it with breathless care into his little hand, his mouth a perfect “O” of wonder.
He brought it up to his eye like a spyglass and squinted at it.
“It’s made from the bones of pirates,” Marchand told him.
“Cor.” Daniel was impressed.
From peering at it with his eyes, he moved it toward his nose and, for reasons known only to him, sniffed it. He paused speculatively,
then darted a sneaky glance at Marchand.
“Do not put that in your mouth,” Marchand said firmly.
“I wasn’t going to,” Daniel lied passionately, his eyes luminously aggrieved.
Marchand held out his hand, and Daniel obediently deposited the ring into his palm.
“Have you got any babies?” Daniel asked him, as Marchand pushed the ring back onto his finger.
Ginny was intrigued when Mr. Marchand didn’t immediately reply.
“I do not have any babies,” he said.
“Lucky. I’ve got a baby bruvver.” This revelation positively thrummed with regret and disgust.
“I see. And how do you feel about that?” Mr. Marchand asked ironically, since how Daniel felt was clear.
“Babies are dumb. I hate him.”
“Daniel!” But Mrs. Peck sounded weary, as though she’d heard this dozens of times.
“Babies are dumb,” Marchand agreed.
At this, all the adults in the room went visibly rigid with shock.
Ooooh. Ginny was now on breathless tenterhooks. Perhaps Marchand would simply crack beneath the strain of maintaining gentlemanly
behavior for whole minutes at a time, and they would be compelled to throw him bodily out of the place. She would so enjoy witnessing that.
“SO dumb!” Daniel repeated, hopping up and down, beside himself with glee at this show of solidarity. “Dumb! They don’t know
anything.”
“They don’t know anything,” Marchand agreed. Daniel giggled again. “But I will tell you something important, young Mr. Peck. Babies are
small and dumb by design—on purpose, that is. And do you know why?”
Daniel shook his head like a wet dog.
The faint rustling Ginny detected was the sound of everyone tensing in case someone needed to leap up to clap a hand over
Mr. Marchand’s mouth. Captain Hardy was closest, and looked most capable.
“Babies are very, very small and fragile. Fragile means they can be easily hurt. Because he’s fragile and doesn’t yet know
anything, he will count on you to help protect him and keep him safe and teach him how to do important things, like ride horses
and swim and eat blancmange.”
“Blaaahmaaajjjj,” Daniel mouthed, still clearly fascinated by this speech.
“And this is how he will help you learn to be brave and strong, all the things a good man needs to be. Being a big brother is one of the most important jobs in the world. As important as being a father or mother or an army captain.” He lowered and softened his voice.
“You want to grow up to be a good man, don’t you, Daniel? ”
Whether or not Daniel understood the entire substance of the message, he was clearly moved by the tone of it. His eyes had
gone limpid with emotion.
The entire room was, in fact, captivated now. Even the fire seemed to stop crackling long enough to listen.
Ginny was unsettled and unwillingly enthralled. She recalled what Marchand had said about Caravaggio, the so-called murderous
thug who created magnificent art. She supposed it was theoretically possible for a man to be an appalling rogue who was nevertheless
good with children.
“So isn’t it clever how that works, Daniel?” Marchand continued. “I think so. Your brother might be dumb now, but he’ll grow
up fast and get smart and you’ll have lots of fun together. But right now he’s only a little baby, and he will look up to
you your whole life. I think you’re so lucky to have each other.”
Marchand said it very gently.
The tears of pathos welling in Daniel’s eyes spilled onto his fluffy lashes and splashed onto his round cheeks. “Mama, I want
to see my bruvver! I want to see him now!”
Mrs. Peck stared in drop-jawed astonishment at Marchand and Daniel.
At last she rose slowly, gingerly, from her chair. “Ah, of course, poppet. Let’s go see your brother.”
As she led a softly weeping Daniel out of the room by the hand, she cast an awestruck, grateful, and somewhat uneasy glance over her shoulder at Mr. Marchand, as if she suspected he might be a sorcerer.
The quiet rustling sound that followed was the room at large exhaling.
Perhaps Mr. Marchand simply had a talent for saying just the right thing to get someone out of a room fast, Ginny thought.
He’d certainly demonstrated that yesterday afternoon when he’d propositioned her.
“Bravo, Mr. Marchand.” Mrs. Pariseau mimed mopping her brow. “How did you know he was about to put that ring in his mouth?”
“Oh, what man can resist tasting pretty things?” he said easily.
Soft pink blushes winked on in all the women’s cheeks around the room. Ginny felt her own face go warm.
“Don’t you employ a few boys from Bethnal Green at your club?” Bolt asked.
Bethnal Green was a notorious workhouse known for exploiting orphans, who were often tricked into working for almost no wages
under appalling conditions.
“I do. As often as I can, at least. I’ve hired a few from there who run errands for me and do some simple chores about the
place. I can at least ensure they’re safe and fed well and paid decent wages.”
And maths, Ginny thought suddenly. Someone is actually teaching those boys maths while they’re at Lucifer’s Fall. Was Marchand actually paying a tutor for them as well? Perhaps he thought sprinkling in a few acts of charity with all the
iniquity would increase his chances of getting into heaven.
“Lord Dominic Kirke came to stay with us not too long ago, Marchand,” Captain Hardy volunteered. Lord Kirke was a famously fiery Whig politician who fought for the rights of the vulnerable, including children.
Marchand looked surprised. “Is that so? I’m a Kirke admirer. I’d love to meet him.”
“We can probably help arrange it,” Bolt told him easily.
Ginny had been assured by Dot that the Grand Palace on the Thames was exclusive, and a visit from Lord Dominic Kirke seemed
to confirm it, which was rather thrilling. Presence of a scoundrel notwithstanding.
“Should we resume reading the myths tonight, just for a change of pace from The Arabian Nights Entertainments?” Mrs. Pariseau held up the book of myths. “We last left off with the story of Daphne and Apollo.”
Everyone concurred, as adult mayhem seemed like just the thing after a bit of child mayhem.
Mrs. Pariseau read all of the parts of the story with great feeling. The gist was that the sun god, Apollo, feeling very proud
and full of himself for shooting and killing a powerful serpent with an arrow, had made fun of Eros, the god of love, for
only being able to shoot little arrows. Whereupon Eros decided Apollo needed to be taught a lesson about pride. So he shot Apollo with an arrow that made
him fall madly in love with a beautiful nymph called Daphne, whose father was the river god Peneus.
And then Eros shot Daphne with an arrow made of lead, which apparently made her find Apollo simply revolting.
A smitten, lust-addled Apollo chased Daphne thither and non to no avail, and poor beleaguered Daphne, seeing no escape from eventually being ravished by the sun god, frantically begged her river-god father to save her. So her father changed her into a laurel tree on the spot.
She was then forever out of reach of Apollo, who was doomed to suffer from lovesickness for eternity.
It was one of those stories that had everything: the perils of arrogance, desperate lusting, unrequited love, spiteful cherubs
with arrows, transformation.
And everyone had a lot of opinions when Mrs. Pariseau finished reading it.
“Do you think what Eros did to Apollo was fair?” Mrs. Pariseau asked the room at large.
“I think Apollo asked for it. He insulted Eros’s archery skills.” Captain Hardy took marksmanship seriously.
All the men in the room nodded in solidarity.
“Then again . . . when you think about it . . . it wasn’t Apollo’s fault that Eros couldn’t take a joke,” Mr. Delacorte countered.